Discussions

With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, there is an impending change of guard involving the open source community. Sun has harbored more open-source projects and developers--and had developed a larger outside community--than any other IT company. Most people quizzed on this topic said they believe that wholesale changes are in the cards.
High-visibility open-source projects such as MySQL, Java, OpenSolaris, GlassFish and NetBeans have been written about often in the week following the announcement of the acquisition, which is due to close in the summer of 2009. But not much has been said about a dozen or so smaller open-source projects (see list on the next page) being hatched at Sun Labs--projects that could very well one day grow up to be a Java or MySQL.
So what's going to happen to all this R&D?
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, the OpenSuSE Community Manager believes that if it fits into the Oracle strategy, or if it's too controversial to eliminate, a project will continue to exist.
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Badly.
This is the beginning of what will be remembered as "The Java wars".
Major players will be Oracle, IBM and HP after having bought RedHat.
In the end the three of them will survive, some happily some thriving, and we will have only one casualty: Java.
Amen.
R

We all know - Larry means money.If you ever meet a sales guy from oracle you would know.:-)
For sure - they would know how to make money from java.
i dont think they will waste too much money on JCP / JSR stuff. They will not make it open source either or even if they do - they will start charging for commercial fully supported version of java.
IBM was a fool to have not taken this risk. this kind of opportunity doesnt come very often.
Now you have weblogic, oracle database, java, solaris OS, sun hardware, tangasol caching, CRM solutions(people soft, siebel) etc--- ALL ARE ORACLE. Its as close as you can get to a monopoly. We should stop complaining about microsoft goign forward. :)
As someone said here - java is goign to suffer .. no doubt about it.
Lets pick up a book on objective C( for mac) and C#....just in case

I think that is to much what you are saying, It makes not sense. If Oracle fucked up Java, Oracle will be fucked up. Oracle is a Java company and I think will be better for Java.
It is like saying that Microsoft will fucked up the things with C# and .Net. if that was the case nobody will or picked or use .Net in all this years, So it is not the case.
Oracle is interested on growing Java and Oracle wants Java be the best programming platform because if people use Java, People use Oracle.
The only thing Im not sure about it is Mysql and of course JavaFX is DOA.

Moving away from JCP will kill Java. I don't think Oracle will ever do it. After all Oracle has more commercial stake in Java than Sun.

JCP is glacially slow (JSR-107?). JCP is irrelevant or tries to mirror existing OpenSource projects. Examples: OSGi, EJB3. And in the end it still does not give us a coherent picture of the future developments.
Come on, Microsoft is probably going to release C#5 with lots of functional programming features, even better LINQ and a whole lot of other improvements by the time Sun would release Java7 without any new significant features.
WPF is already way nicer than SWING and Silverlight is better than JavaFX vaporware.

Moving away from JCP will kill Java. I don't think Oracle will ever do it. After all Oracle has more commercial stake in Java than Sun.

JCP is glacially slow (JSR-107?). JCP is irrelevant or tries to mirror existing OpenSource projects. Examples: OSGi, EJB3. And in the end it still does not give us a coherent picture of the future developments.

Come on, Microsoft is probably going to release C#5 with lots of functional programming features, even better LINQ and a whole lot of other improvements by the time Sun would release Java7 without any new significant features.

WPF is already way nicer than SWING and Silverlight is better than JavaFX vaporware.

comparing swing to sliverlight is a bit of a reach. it would be better to compare silverlight to flash. JavaFX is vaporware. In .NET circles, many think WPF isn't an improvement, so it's really a personal preference.
LINQ is ok, but it's got plenty of limitations.
peter

Come on, Microsoft is probably going to release C#5 with lots of functional programming features, even better LINQ and a whole lot of other improvements by the time Sun would release Java7 without any new significant features.

Uh, let's just digest C# 4.0 first, shall we? C# 4.0 is due out soon (this year) and will indeed have (small) improvements to LINQ: Expression trees will be extended to be statements and blocks rather than "just" expressions. And then the expression trees will be unified with the DLR (dynamic language runtime) so that the concrete syntax trees are actually expression trees.
The big news in C# 4.0 is dynamic variables, i.e. dynamic name/member resolution. This will allow seamless integration with DOMs (such as a browser DOM document), with dynamic languages like Ruby/Python and with old-school COM.
Microsoft has hinted that C# beyond 4 will probably focus parsing and compilation, allowing more on-the-fly compilation as well as letting developers tap into and intercept the compiler.
There little doubt that C# is being advanced much, much faster than Java. Question of course is: Is it too fast?
IMO there's also little doubt that the JCP as all but stalled. Not coming to an agreement on reified generics and closures is a big disappointment. Java 7 turns out to be a mess. And you just may be right about Java 8 probably within the same time frame as C# 5 - although I think LINQ is about done now (I use it on a daily basis now - and I just love it).
I don't think JavaFX fits the "vaporware" label. It's a little late and not *quite* done. Sun did bet on an uptake on mobile devices. That was clever as Java does have a strong presence there and neither AIR nor Silverlight are quite ready there yet. Unfortunately, while Sun was developing Java, the iPhone happened. The most prolific smartphone has shut the door on Java/JavaFX - and any other non-Apple "virtual machines".

I think that is to much what you are saying, It makes not sense. If Oracle fucked up Java, Oracle will be fucked up. Oracle is a Java company and I think will be better for Java.

It is like saying that Microsoft will fucked up the things with C# and .Net. if that was the case nobody will or picked or use .Net in all this years, So it is not the case.

Oracle is interested on growing Java and Oracle wants Java be the best programming platform because if people use Java, People use Oracle.

The only thing Im not sure about it is Mysql and of course JavaFX is DOA.

C# and .Net don't make money for m$'s competitors. And if you don't think m$ would do everything possible to make mono even less compatible if it became apparent that customers were running .net applications on unix, you're crazy.
Anyway, it's pie in the sky for a while.
My expectation is that we'll have two versions of oracle java. A paid version that's actively developed and a subpar community version. Additionally, you'll probably start seeing a larger variety of jvms used. Currently, I find the vast majority run hotspot unless they're on aix and/or weblogic.
I'm not sure why people are making a broohaha about anything else in sun's portfolio. I like solaris/glassfish/mysql. But if they didn't exist, it's an inconvenience, not a game changer.

They wouldn't even need to do much just offering a dumbed down community version would either force the competition to raise up(apache harmony and alikes) or simply scare away most Java shops.
If they take any attitude to interfere in the JSR/JCP negatively or biasly in a way that prevents competition they will scare Java shops away.
Java with Oracle vendor-lock in is just a dumbed down .Net. People won't stand for it and they will flock to PHP/Ruby/Python or whatever.
Not to mention making java uncompetitive would bring many lawsuits from IBM, RedHat, SpringSource and many others with stackes in Java.

Larry Ellison said, "We have Java," after this deal. Not 'We have Sun.'
Java was the goal. So what is in Oracle's strategic interest?
I think they will put more effort into Java, which has fallen behind .Net languages in feature set & design.
I think they will understand Java from a user's point of view, and that will be good for the language, esp usability.
I don't think they will dump JCP but I don't that JCP will stop Oracle from adding what they want to Java (and letting JCP decide if they want it.)
I don't think they will charge for it.
I think Oracle will seize on how to make the Java platform more attractive.
It never made sense that a hardware company owned Java.

Open Source issue needs to be addressed in the new scenario... Oracle has been very successful in utilizing the opportunity offered to them,, even when they did not have the best products or technology. This had been the case since day 1 when IBM put the stamp if approval on relational database in the mid eighties by announcing DB2. Until they IBM had the sql/ds toy...Oracle was the biggest beneficiary with this DB2 announcement. The same happened with Java from Sun. Oracle easily and quickly got the benefit when Java applications began to be popular...
Sun did huge blunders. Big stuffs like "Galssfish", "Netbeans" etc did not become the leaders...The only thing Su did 'cmmercially' right was gto give the JDK free! But JDK was just JDK! Not even an editor came alongwith that! Other free or shareware products helped the users. Sun should have given at least a minimal workbench!
Regarding mySQL, Oracle has many options... To keep it forever or for some time... until all users move on to a trimmed FREE version of Oracle DB!
I was never a fan of Oracke.. But in recent times, I am impressed by their way of putting the software freely avaiable for download! No timelocks or 21 days etc etc!

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